NTID announces National Science Fair winners

Rochester, NY – The National Technical Institute for the Deaf recently hosted its third national science fair for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. More than fifty contestants from fourteen schools in ten states brought their exhibits to Rochester for the competition. The science fair promotes interest in technology, science, engineering and math among sixth through twelfth graders with hearing loss.

“The quality of the projects was top-notch,” says Heather Emerson Jeremy, assistant director of pre-college outreach. “A lot of observers, including the judges, were quite impressed with the science projects.”

First, second and third places were awarded to middle and high school students and the team division.

Here are the top 2008 winners:

High school division: Victoria Rainey, tenth grade, Illinois School for the Deaf (Jacksonville, IL) for “First- and second-hand smoke.”

Middle school division: Sara Stanislow, sixth grade, Barker Road Middle School (Pittsford, NY) for “Does the insulation really work?”

Team division: Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, Knolis Davis (twelfth grade), Zobia Malik (eleventh grade) and Frankie Repici (tenth grade) for “How chemicals contaminate our watersheds.”

Plans are under way for the 2009 National Science Fair. Go to www.rit.edu/NTID for more information.

CCNY to award engineering doctorates

New York, NY – The Grove School of Engineering at City College of New York (CCNY) now awards PhD and masters of philosophy degrees in five engineering disciplines: biomedical engineering, ChE, CE, EE and ME. CCNY has offered doctoral education in engineering since 1963 through the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. A new certification from the New York State Board of Regents now allows students entering the doctoral programs to register for classes at the City College instead of the CUNY Graduate Center.

“These developments present an exciting opportunity to transform the City College of New York from a masters institution to a doctoral institution,” said Dr Zeev Dagan, CCNY senior vice president and provost. “Being classified as a PhD-granting institution will bring us greater visibility and more recognition.”

The change in degree status comes as the school is expanding research facilities. Construction has started on two new science research buildings at CCNY’s south campus. One will house the CUNY Science Research Center; the other will be a research center for City College. The buildings are part of the school’s move to become a research-oriented institution.

There are currently 202 PhD candidates in engineering at CCNY; a significant portion are women and underrepresented minorities.

Sandia design competition names 2008 MEMS winners

Albuquerque, NM – Winners have been announced in Sandia National Laboratories’ fourth annual University Alliance Design Competition for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) designs.

The University of Oklahoma, under the leadership of faculty advisor Harold Stalford, won the novel design category for a mechanical micromuscle arm powered by thermal actuators. Potential applications of the arm include microsurgical operations and assembly of 3-D MEMS devices.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) won in a second category, new this year, which calls for a micro design that will reliably inspect nanoscale phenomena. Under the direction of Professor Ioannis Chasiotis, the UIUC team designed a MEMS platform that is able to perform creep and stress relaxation tests on polymeric, metallic and biological nanofibers.

Participation in the alliance now stands at twenty schools, up from seventeen a year ago. This year, five schools entered seven designs in the contest. An incentive for universities to join the alliance is that all contest participants can actually see their workable designs produced in Sandia’s MEMS production facilities, where a special design competition reticle is set aside for just this purpose.

For more information about the contest or to learn how an educational institution can become a member of the University Alliance, contact Stephanie Johnson at srjohns@sandia.gov.

D/C

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